Well, that depends on what you call an OS.. but sure, in the most strict form this might be classified as some sort of OS, but if you would like you could call the bios-code an OS.. It just depends where you draw the line..
The idea was just to separate the hardware/OS with a simple layer that could be implemented in dedicated hardware OR as an extra 'process' that you would run on the hypervisor..
Another cool idea for this could be to include some hardware monitor that always will run on the system, so without any OS-dependant things you could easily get a hardware report from the system without installing ANY type of OS monitor except maybe for something that just connects to the hw-monitor and generates a logfile..
And with this maybe we could get a 'driver-independent' environment too. For each hardware just put the drivers on the flash and then just have a generic API for all network-cards etc. Could probably save the companies quite a bit to have one general driver for all different OS'es. Only thing required for this is some type of shared memory between the driver-instance and the os-instance, and since they then would have these drivers on flash the drivers could be optimized for that specific hardware without the need to tune the OS.
And if they dont lock these things down you could write really cool things like a iscsi-initiator that behaves like a scsi-card for the system.. No need to get a iscsi-hba for booting and no need for iscsi-initiators on the host-os that can screw things up like if you are swapping over iscsi on a linux system and you run out of RAM for the networking-part.
Another few cool ideas for the driver-stuff: - Virtual network-interface for a specific vlan. Would be perfect if you want to have some virtual production-systems and DMZ'ed systems on the same physical hardware as your firewall. - Semi-hardware raid that uses the main cpu for the work but without having the need for badly written drivers. (ie, just one raid-sw code-tree to maintain) - Nvidia/ATI etc could write a generic driver for all os'es and then the os would just need to implement a generic driver for all OpenGL cards.. No more need for binary blobs in Linux and less code for nvidia to maintain since the generic opengl-driver stuff would be moved to the OS-vendor and that could also enable sharing of a gfx-card with OpenGL capabilities for multiple virtual systems at the same time. - Encryption layer for the RAID without having some type of OS support for it. One generic driver works for all and keys could be from anywhere like keyboard-input or USB-memory. - a REAL os-independent save-to-disk function. Since the os just have generic drivers only those would need to have support for it and it would be the driver-instance that would take care of saving the actual system-state. - 'Swap-driver' that could map both ram and disk space as 'virtual ram' that would enable the system to share physical memory between the machines. But ofcourse this could cause a ugly-swap state if trying to use to much ram between the systems, but that could be solved by having some type of extension of the os'es that could monitor the total system memory-usage.
All this would both reduce the number of drivers that the OS-vendors need to support and also reduce the number of drivers that the hardware vendors needs to maintain if they want to support multiple-platforms and would probably give us more stable drivers since they will have a bigger testing-ground and also less types of OS-specific configurations.
The über-programmers do exist, but they prefer to do their own projects instead of working for some big company =)
But i think he missed one thing in his article... The productivity is also affected by the co-workers.. If had a scale from 1 to 10 and you mix programmers (or any other type of work) from the lowest level to the highest level the fast ones will slow down and the slow ones will speed up (to a degree).. Why you ask? Well, the 'fast' ones will always have to wait for 'slow', and if you have a very minimal diff is salary the fast ones will feel under-compensated and don't have the same urge to perform to their maximum.. So there are allot of things to think about... Another thing is if you have a group of very good programmers that work together they can inspire each other with new ideas, while if you have a mix the ones on the lower end of the scale might have a problem to understand everything so you have a 'one way information-flow'... Some mix is always good, but try not to have to much skill-difference within one group of people...
Another few things to keep über-technofreaks from running away are: - To much administrative tasks?.. (time-reporting in bad tools...) - Documentation... Always a tedious task.. Get one of the 'not so skilled' developers to do it. And it's also a good way to train him... - Strange statistics without a very clear connection to what they are doing.. Less statistics, that they will see, is ALWAYS good! - If you have 2 people that do the same work then they should have about the same salary, even if one has 10 more years in the field... - Aim for good hardware... A system that's just a bit slow can cause a lot more than just 5 minutes or worktime a day.. If something starts to cause problems during the wrong time the 'red thread' can be lost and cause lots of more lost time than the actual system 'lost' for the user. - If possible, don't lock people into a specific OS.. Lots of times it can be better to have the developers on whatever OS they prefer... And a bonus if doing os-independent development is that you get testing on multiple platforms. - Make sure that they always learn new stuff... If they start to think of them selves as 'code-slaves' they will switch away.. But make it their choice to switch! - Any type of frustration.... Fruit-basket empty all the time? Just get a bigger one!:D
And the most important thing ever!! NEVER EVER have the manager decide what to do for fun on a team-building getaway.. Most programmers, at my age at least, don't like golf!:D
With a pluggable scheduler they would open up OPTIONS for people that needs to have a different workload... What's included later into the mainstream kernel is then a completely different thing.. But you could at least have 2 basic schedulers.. One that favors latency and one that favors throughput.. And as previously written here is that latency is much more important in games than throughput.
Or maybe as an alternative to the pluggable-scheduler idea... Just having access to a few of the tunable variables like max-time a process can spend in the cpu (reduce = lower latency, increase = higher throughput), or maybe be able to hardcode how much cpu-time a process can take in one run, or maybe have some switches that enables you to switch to a mode that causes the process to be on the top of the list if it's waiting for some type of input.. Or as from the CK patchset have something that enables you to have a process run ONLY on idle ticks..
The thing here is that there are so many different workloads that it's impossible to have a preconfigured scheduler that suits everyone. And if compared to the windows schedulers as someone did previously here there is a BIG difference.. In windows the scheduler is tied together with the window-manager that enables the scheduler to see what window(s) the users are using and give them a latency/performance boost.
So even if the developers do care about desktop linux i can also say, from my own experience, that coders dont play games as much as other people:)
Ehmm... I'm not a 'gamer'.. Maybe once every 2 months or so if i don't have anything better to do... But most people i know below 30 are playing games, and without having good support for that in gnu/linux they will never switch away from windows.
The problem the linux distributions have today is that they have a bad reputation that scares people away and this scares people away from it.. (remember that all unknowns are scary for most people)
Now back to the topic... First of all i do want to say that i have not had the chance to try the CFS scheduler yet, but the thing here is that the SD scheduler where great on lots of other tasks too. With the plain O1 scheduler i had lots of problems when playing video-streams during high-cpu load,and the issue was that the scheduler gave background-jobs to large timeslices that cause the player to skip frames and such. With the SD scheduler there where some really nice things you could do then too, like setting the background-jobs to SCHED_ISO that caused the process ONLY to use unused cpu-time and this worked great. Could have 5-6 gcc's loading the cpu without even a frame dropped and did try out a opengl game (enemyterritory) during compilations just to see how it worked, and no problems there either.. Then after switching back to the O1 scheduler i could not even have 2-3 gcc's running without loosing LOTS of frames, and did not even bother with trying out a game..
So you see, games are just a part of it.. All types of lowlatency applications like video, music, games and some daemons like nfsd and such needs a good scheduler to give the best performance/interactivity.
I think i'm gonna give the CFS scheduler a try during the week, but i dont have any high hopes after what people have reported about it yet. And i do think it would be a better idea to implement multiple schedulers that you could choose between instead of having 'one size fits all'.
Well, not completely.. If you would enhance it with sometype of protective layer then no problem... And for an airplane it could be a bog gain. The wings could be in one single large sheet where the inside is covered with some type of protection from the fuel and outside with some type of lightweight material that protects it from rain.
Just a few things i can think of for this: - Cables (if it has the same electric properties as nano-tubes) - Wires (embedded in some type of protective layer) - Reinforcement of pressure-pipes, just add a protective layer.. - Reinforcement of protective-gear like bullet-proof vests.. - Reinforcement of gas-tubes (higher pressure = more capacity) - Have a look at this too.. http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/111704/Nanotube s_tune_in_light_111704.html
Dont know all the properties of it, but even if it only have some of the properties of nano-tubes there would be a massive amount of uses for it, even if it's sensitive to water.
That sounds strange... I got a ralink card bundled with my asus mainboard and it worked out of the box (2.6 kernel) with the ra2x00 drivers. But maybe you are running one of the more dists that are a bit more restrictive on updates, like debian?
Btw... Not really using the wifi-card, but it's always fun to see all 60-70 neighbors running their networks unencrypted..:)
h264 content is no problem... The problem is if you wanna play some some h264 HDTV content.. But can you really do that with a tivo??
Basic configuration i listed was just for normal 'low-def' recordings.. If you want to get some higher resolution you of course need a bit more power in the system.
I have played h264 on my Sepron64/GeForce7200 system without to much problem... So instead of the 100$ board go with $40 cpu, $50 motherboard and a $50 gfx-card.. Will bump up the price with around $50 and will increase the power-usage of the system, but it will manage to play hdtv content...
And once again, here is the power of a DIY HTPC, you can choose what hardware you want for what you want to do.. If you wanna play that 1080p content go get some hardware that can manage to play it.. If you just wanna view plain old mpeg2's recorded from your analog or DVB-t card then you can manage with one of the budget via boards...
Well, accidents happen.. Maybe they crashed because they had an accident in space and where forced to land on our small planet..
Can't really say anything about humanoid beings but who knows... Some scientists say that earth could have been 'seeded' by an asteroid that had some bacteria passengers. Or what if earth was actually seeded by some alien race?
Maybe we have been visited, but it would require something more than a fuzzy video to prove it.. And dont even wanna think about all the havoc it would raise in the religious circles if someone had some evidence of alien visitation.. And if some government(s) would get some proof of this i think that they would sit on it 'until the world was ready'.
You probably need update your knowledge about those... Normal TV works out of the box with plain mpeg2 (got a hardware decoder for it even!) but for HDTV you will need one of the new boards with support for it... if you wanna offload the cpu for xvid and such you can go with one of the boards with one of those CN400 chipsets that has mpeg4 acceleration...
There you have a short story about someone that built a box... and about the prices..
VIA EPIA board - $100 (these are a bit expensive, so it might even be cheaper to go with some low-end motherboard with built-in gfx card and a AMD-Sempron..) 128Mb RAM - $30 (128Mb is quite enough for a pure mythtv box) HD 160Gb - $40 TV-Card (DVB-T) - $80 (With a CI-Slot) Case - $50
hmm... so that's $300, and with this you have full control...... Want to have a HDTV capable box, then just go with a bit more expensive EPIA board with DVI output... Want to have more than one PCI card, maybe 2 hybrid tuners, then go with a case that supports a raiser card.
So there you go... with $300 you can have a simple tv-box, add a few more $ and get dual-tuners, add a few more and have a HDTV capable box... add a few more and control you X10 home-automation system.. Don't like the remote? Well, get a bluetooth dongle for the system and use your cellphone, or just buy some other remote...
This is the charm with mythtv.. You can do just about anything if you want to.
And a tip if you are going to build a system like this. Do keep in mind that you might want upgrade the system in the future so try to think of what you might want to add in the future.. And if you are going to have it as the main entertainment system try to keep everything on the system at stable-versions and no SVN checkouts:)
- Install whatever distribution you prefer - Install fluxbox - Configure fluxbox so you have a static menu on the top left with the applications that they might want to run - Install Firefox - Install Thunderbird ( added wmpop3 so he don't have to start the mail client to see if he has any mails ) - Install Openoffice - Install GPhoto2
My dad has a keyboard with a few multifunction-keys on the top that i mapped to the different workspaces. It seems like he has problems with understanding the concept of having multiple windows on the same workspace and lots easier to just start the different applications on their predetermined workspaces and just press the "web-button" or the "mail-button"
Even have some simple scripts for him so he can just select album(s) from GPhoto and the system records it to a CD/DVD that he then can play in his DVD-player..
And maybe install a VNC-server that you can access via a SSH tunnel and your are done...
It's perfect for him... And why did i do this?? Well, he complained that Windows was hard and messy to use! And this was of course his first computer ever. (about 1½ year ago:)
What i'm getting irritated on is that people without real experience with any Linux distribution chooses the most difficult ones to use. Shure you are good on Windows, but that does not automatically give you experience on *nix systems. And then ofcourse complain about how hard the system is to use.. I would say, if you don't know by heart how to manually compile and use a new kernel from kernel.org on your system you should be running one of the simpler distributions.. You still have all the options of changing the configuration there, but you have alot of automatic things too until you know how to do that manually too.
I have been running different distributions on my private system for about 12-13 years now and working with it for about 10 years, and every single say something new comes up, so don't pick the hardest one to start with, go with one of the simpler where things are automated until you feel a bit more shure about how it works, then maybe try another distribution if you are not satisfied with the simple one.
I remember an old story of something similar many years ago where they where using a gas-lens for lasers to reduce the heat-stress you get on a glass-lens.
*scream* The GPLv3 is unfair!!! We got this source for free to use in our commercial product with minimal changes... Now we cannot use DRM with it...
*ironic*
I just hate companies like this.. They get something for free and think they can do anything with it, and don't even care about the wishes of the people that has written the actual source.
But hey.. They can still user DRM'ed stuff with that box... They just have to implement some hardware-chip that will do the DRM decoding and then the software just needs a driver to know how to send it to the chip.. But ofcourse adding something like that to the box will probably cost them more than doing it all in software. And with a DRM chip they would not have this problem with the GPLv3 and people could do all the mods they wanted on the TiVo..
If they wanna blow just the plane then it's probably impossible to stop them with any tech on the plane, but with a knockout gas they can at least prevent them from crashing the plane into a building..
Planes today can fly and even land automatically but it's not allowed to use yet since the tech is very new and not tested enough so that's why they still need pilots.. And just get a route to the closest airport and land there is probably allot easier than to have a spy-plane that flies on it's own in enemy territory where it has to avoid missiles and stuff.
And about security... Have a look at the televised encryption, the way they have broken that in the past is via hacking the cards to get the master-keys.. If you want something more secure for the planes then make the 'cards' unique for every plane and bump up the key-length and number of keys that needs to be used. So to make something like this secure is probably the easiest part. The hardest issues here are still the human factor since someone could pose as an engineer and do something to the plane, but they can do that even today if they just wanna crash the plane.. Doing something like this moves the security issue to the ground to the engineers, and it's probably much easier to catch someone tampering with the plane on the ground than it is to catch someone that just really wanna blow up a plane in the air.
- Separate the cockpit from the rest of the plane and have their own entrance to it, if the pilots need access to the rest of the plane then make it the other way around by having the passenger area separate from the rest of the plane. - Have a signal that can be sent to the plane that will allow remote-control or autopilot to the closest airport that the pilots cannot override without clearance from the ground. - Signal from the ground can make the autopilot to set a specific course and altitude for a number of minutes. - The lock on the cockpit door can only be unlocked by someone on the ground. - Knockout gas that the pilots can release into the passenger area. (maybe better that a few people dies than the whole plane crashes)
And to make the communication with the plane more secure (so no one can interfere with the signals) allow for both laser and RF communication, maybe even put the whole passenger area in a faraday-cage and have 2 antennas for separate sat and ground communication.
Hehe... And that triggers MS to roll out a new version and make the 'stable' one unsupported ofcourse... Luckily i'm only using Linux at home but still forced to use windows at work.. But i dont care about all those reboots and patch-installations since i dont work in the IT department:)
Windows is perfect at work.. 5-10 minutes of bonus-breaks during the day is really nice:)
Well, you don't seem to understand the point here..
With electricity it would be the same, but then again you would have to go into the coffee-shop to use it and they could have a sign or the employees could tell him that... With WiFi you dont have that requirement so it's impossible to people to know if they are giving away some bandwith or if it is for private use. You don't seem to get the point.. If you have a WiFi connection it's broadcasting 'connect to me' over the air, and without requiring any key it is actually saying that it's there for everyone.
I'm just saying that a open WiFi connection is comparable to a public restroom or a public street.. But with physical locations it's much easier to tell people if it's for public or private use. If you dont want anyone to connect to your private network then just put a password on it to say it's private, or put signs all over the area saying that it is for private use:P
Well, if you take the car then nobody else can use it.
Better comparison would be with a bench standing in some public area without any signs telling you not to use it.. Or a trashcan in a public area, without any signs, is that also illegal to use? And this would also create a cost for the owner of the trashcan!
And making these types of comparisons is not a good way to reason.. Because with these things you can easily have a notice on or at them. But with 'virtual' stuff like wifi-access it's much more of a hassle to tell users 'We are for public use' compared to restricting access to it.... Best way for this would be to just have a sign in the coffee-shop saying "The WIFI access has password 'coffee' and is for customer use only" or just have a welcome-page that users are required to view/accept before they get access if they want to dumb it down for the customers.
When unsecured it says 'welcome in', and how can you know that the AP is not for public use when unsecured like this? I know many friends that have open networks that anyone can use when walking by.
If they want it private just use WEP with a simple key, or if the users are brain-dead use a name like coffeeshop-Private.
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Well, that depends on what you call an OS.. but sure, in the most strict form this might be classified as some sort of OS, but if you would like you could call the bios-code an OS.. It just depends where you draw the line..
The idea was just to separate the hardware/OS with a simple layer that could be implemented in dedicated hardware OR as an extra 'process' that you would run on the hypervisor..
Another cool idea for this could be to include some hardware monitor that always will run on the system, so without any OS-dependant things you could easily get a hardware report from the system without installing ANY type of OS monitor except maybe for something that just connects to the hw-monitor and generates a logfile..
And with this maybe we could get a 'driver-independent' environment too. For each hardware just put the drivers on the flash and then just have a generic API for all network-cards etc. Could probably save the companies quite a bit to have one general driver for all different OS'es. Only thing required for this is some type of shared memory between the driver-instance and the os-instance, and since they then would have these drivers on flash the drivers could be optimized for that specific hardware without the need to tune the OS.
And if they dont lock these things down you could write really cool things like a iscsi-initiator that behaves like a scsi-card for the system.. No need to get a iscsi-hba for booting and no need for iscsi-initiators on the host-os that can screw things up like if you are swapping over iscsi on a linux system and you run out of RAM for the networking-part.
Another few cool ideas for the driver-stuff:
- Virtual network-interface for a specific vlan. Would be perfect if you want to have some virtual production-systems and DMZ'ed systems on the same physical hardware as your firewall.
- Semi-hardware raid that uses the main cpu for the work but without having the need for badly written drivers. (ie, just one raid-sw code-tree to maintain)
- Nvidia/ATI etc could write a generic driver for all os'es and then the os would just need to implement a generic driver for all OpenGL cards.. No more need for binary blobs in Linux and less code for nvidia to maintain since the generic opengl-driver stuff would be moved to the OS-vendor and that could also enable sharing of a gfx-card with OpenGL capabilities for multiple virtual systems at the same time.
- Encryption layer for the RAID without having some type of OS support for it. One generic driver works for all and keys could be from anywhere like keyboard-input or USB-memory.
- a REAL os-independent save-to-disk function. Since the os just have generic drivers only those would need to have support for it and it would be the driver-instance that would take care of saving the actual system-state.
- 'Swap-driver' that could map both ram and disk space as 'virtual ram' that would enable the system to share physical memory between the machines. But ofcourse this could cause a ugly-swap state if trying to use to much ram between the systems, but that could be solved by having some type of extension of the os'es that could monitor the total system memory-usage.
All this would both reduce the number of drivers that the OS-vendors need to support and also reduce the number of drivers that the hardware vendors needs to maintain if they want to support multiple-platforms and would probably give us more stable drivers since they will have a bigger testing-ground and also less types of OS-specific configurations.
Read the manual FFS.. Aim away from your face! :)
Just went back and read my own post... Ignore all grammatic/spelling errors..... Was a bit tired when i wrote it...
The über-programmers do exist, but they prefer to do their own projects instead of working for some big company =)
:D
:D
But i think he missed one thing in his article... The productivity is also affected by the co-workers.. If had a scale from 1 to 10 and you mix programmers (or any other type of work) from the lowest level to the highest level the fast ones will slow down and the slow ones will speed up (to a degree).. Why you ask? Well, the 'fast' ones will always have to wait for 'slow', and if you have a very minimal diff is salary the fast ones will feel under-compensated and don't have the same urge to perform to their maximum.. So there are allot of things to think about... Another thing is if you have a group of very good programmers that work together they can inspire each other with new ideas, while if you have a mix the ones on the lower end of the scale might have a problem to understand everything so you have a 'one way information-flow'...
Some mix is always good, but try not to have to much skill-difference within one group of people...
Another few things to keep über-technofreaks from running away are:
- To much administrative tasks?.. (time-reporting in bad tools...)
- Documentation... Always a tedious task.. Get one of the 'not so skilled' developers to do it. And it's also a good way to train him...
- Strange statistics without a very clear connection to what they are doing.. Less statistics, that they will see, is ALWAYS good!
- If you have 2 people that do the same work then they should have about the same salary, even if one has 10 more years in the field...
- Aim for good hardware... A system that's just a bit slow can cause a lot more than just 5 minutes or worktime a day.. If something starts to cause problems during the wrong time the 'red thread' can be lost and cause lots of more lost time than the actual system 'lost' for the user.
- If possible, don't lock people into a specific OS.. Lots of times it can be better to have the developers on whatever OS they prefer... And a bonus if doing os-independent development is that you get testing on multiple platforms.
- Make sure that they always learn new stuff... If they start to think of them selves as 'code-slaves' they will switch away.. But make it their choice to switch!
- Any type of frustration.... Fruit-basket empty all the time? Just get a bigger one!
And the most important thing ever!!
NEVER EVER have the manager decide what to do for fun on a team-building getaway.. Most programmers, at my age at least, don't like golf!
With a pluggable scheduler they would open up OPTIONS for people that needs to have a different workload... What's included later into the mainstream kernel is then a completely different thing.. But you could at least have 2 basic schedulers.. One that favors latency and one that favors throughput.. And as previously written here is that latency is much more important in games than throughput.
:)
Or maybe as an alternative to the pluggable-scheduler idea... Just having access to a few of the tunable variables like max-time a process can spend in the cpu (reduce = lower latency, increase = higher throughput), or maybe be able to hardcode how much cpu-time a process can take in one run, or maybe have some switches that enables you to switch to a mode that causes the process to be on the top of the list if it's waiting for some type of input.. Or as from the CK patchset have something that enables you to have a process run ONLY on idle ticks..
The thing here is that there are so many different workloads that it's impossible to have a preconfigured scheduler that suits everyone. And if compared to the windows schedulers as someone did previously here there is a BIG difference.. In windows the scheduler is tied together with the window-manager that enables the scheduler to see what window(s) the users are using and give them a latency/performance boost.
So even if the developers do care about desktop linux i can also say, from my own experience, that coders dont play games as much as other people
Ehmm... I'm not a 'gamer'.. Maybe once every 2 months or so if i don't have anything better to do... But most people i know below 30 are playing games, and without having good support for that in gnu/linux they will never switch away from windows.
The problem the linux distributions have today is that they have a bad reputation that scares people away and this scares people away from it.. (remember that all unknowns are scary for most people)
Now back to the topic... First of all i do want to say that i have not had the chance to try the CFS scheduler yet, but the thing here is that the SD scheduler where great on lots of other tasks too. With the plain O1 scheduler i had lots of problems when playing video-streams during high-cpu load,and the issue was that the scheduler gave background-jobs to large timeslices that cause the player to skip frames and such. With the SD scheduler there where some really nice things you could do then too, like setting the background-jobs to SCHED_ISO that caused the process ONLY to use unused cpu-time and this worked great. Could have 5-6 gcc's loading the cpu without even a frame dropped and did try out a opengl game (enemyterritory) during compilations just to see how it worked, and no problems there either.. Then after switching back to the O1 scheduler i could not even have 2-3 gcc's running without loosing LOTS of frames, and did not even bother with trying out a game..
So you see, games are just a part of it.. All types of lowlatency applications like video, music, games and some daemons like nfsd and such needs a good scheduler to give the best performance/interactivity.
I think i'm gonna give the CFS scheduler a try during the week, but i dont have any high hopes after what people have reported about it yet. And i do think it would be a better idea to implement multiple schedulers that you could choose between instead of having 'one size fits all'.
Well, not completely.. If you would enhance it with sometype of protective layer then no problem...
e s_tune_in_light_111704.html
And for an airplane it could be a bog gain. The wings could be in one single large sheet where the inside is covered with some type of protection from the fuel and outside with some type of lightweight material that protects it from rain.
Just a few things i can think of for this:
- Cables (if it has the same electric properties as nano-tubes)
- Wires (embedded in some type of protective layer)
- Reinforcement of pressure-pipes, just add a protective layer..
- Reinforcement of protective-gear like bullet-proof vests..
- Reinforcement of gas-tubes (higher pressure = more capacity)
- Have a look at this too.. http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/111704/Nanotub
Dont know all the properties of it, but even if it only have some of the properties of nano-tubes there would be a massive amount of uses for it, even if it's sensitive to water.
That sounds strange... I got a ralink card bundled with my asus mainboard and it worked out of the box (2.6 kernel) with the ra2x00 drivers. But maybe you are running one of the more dists that are a bit more restrictive on updates, like debian?
:)
Btw... Not really using the wifi-card, but it's always fun to see all 60-70 neighbors running their networks unencrypted..
h264 content is no problem... The problem is if you wanna play some some h264 HDTV content.. But can you really do that with a tivo??
Basic configuration i listed was just for normal 'low-def' recordings.. If you want to get some higher resolution you of course need a bit more power in the system.
I have played h264 on my Sepron64/GeForce7200 system without to much problem... So instead of the 100$ board go with $40 cpu, $50 motherboard and a $50 gfx-card.. Will bump up the price with around $50 and will increase the power-usage of the system, but it will manage to play hdtv content...
And once again, here is the power of a DIY HTPC, you can choose what hardware you want for what you want to do.. If you wanna play that 1080p content go get some hardware that can manage to play it.. If you just wanna view plain old mpeg2's recorded from your analog or DVB-t card then you can manage with one of the budget via boards...
Well, accidents happen.. Maybe they crashed because they had an accident in space and where forced to land on our small planet..
Can't really say anything about humanoid beings but who knows... Some scientists say that earth could have been 'seeded' by an asteroid that had some bacteria passengers. Or what if earth was actually seeded by some alien race?
Maybe we have been visited, but it would require something more than a fuzzy video to prove it.. And dont even wanna think about all the havoc it would raise in the religious circles if someone had some evidence of alien visitation.. And if some government(s) would get some proof of this i think that they would sit on it 'until the world was ready'.
You probably need update your knowledge about those... Normal TV works out of the box with plain mpeg2 (got a hardware decoder for it even!) but for HDTV you will need one of the new boards with support for it... if you wanna offload the cpu for xvid and such you can go with one of the boards with one of those CN400 chipsets that has mpeg4 acceleration...
e s/cn896/
Just have a look at this chipset...or any of the others...
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/c-seri
Before stating things like that please do a check of what people already are using for this and what's supported on those boards...
http://www.xyzcomputing.com/index.php?option=conte nt&task=view&id=589&Itemid=0&limit=1&limitstart=6
:)
There you have a short story about someone that built a box... and about the prices..
VIA EPIA board - $100 (these are a bit expensive, so it might even be cheaper to go with some low-end motherboard with built-in gfx card and a AMD-Sempron..)
128Mb RAM - $30 (128Mb is quite enough for a pure mythtv box)
HD 160Gb - $40
TV-Card (DVB-T) - $80 (With a CI-Slot)
Case - $50
hmm... so that's $300, and with this you have full control...... Want to have a HDTV capable box, then just go with a bit more expensive EPIA board with DVI output... Want to have more than one PCI card, maybe 2 hybrid tuners, then go with a case that supports a raiser card.
So there you go... with $300 you can have a simple tv-box, add a few more $ and get dual-tuners, add a few more and have a HDTV capable box... add a few more and control you X10 home-automation system..
Don't like the remote? Well, get a bluetooth dongle for the system and use your cellphone, or just buy some other remote...
This is the charm with mythtv.. You can do just about anything if you want to.
And a tip if you are going to build a system like this. Do keep in mind that you might want upgrade the system in the future so try to think of what you might want to add in the future.. And if you are going to have it as the main entertainment system try to keep everything on the system at stable-versions and no SVN checkouts
Simple... Do what i did for my dad.
:)
- Install whatever distribution you prefer
- Install fluxbox
- Configure fluxbox so you have a static menu on the top left with the applications that they might want to run
- Install Firefox
- Install Thunderbird ( added wmpop3 so he don't have to start the mail client to see if he has any mails )
- Install Openoffice
- Install GPhoto2
My dad has a keyboard with a few multifunction-keys on the top that i mapped to the different workspaces. It seems like he has problems with understanding the concept of having multiple windows on the same workspace and lots easier to just start the different applications on their predetermined workspaces and just press the "web-button" or the "mail-button"
Even have some simple scripts for him so he can just select album(s) from GPhoto and the system records it to a CD/DVD that he then can play in his DVD-player..
And maybe install a VNC-server that you can access via a SSH tunnel and your are done...
It's perfect for him... And why did i do this?? Well, he complained that Windows was hard and messy to use! And this was of course his first computer ever. (about 1½ year ago
What i'm getting irritated on is that people without real experience with any Linux distribution chooses the most difficult ones to use. Shure you are good on Windows, but that does not automatically give you experience on *nix systems.
And then ofcourse complain about how hard the system is to use.. I would say, if you don't know by heart how to manually compile and use a new kernel from kernel.org on your system you should be running one of the simpler distributions.. You still have all the options of changing the configuration there, but you have alot of automatic things too until you know how to do that manually too.
I have been running different distributions on my private system for about 12-13 years now and working with it for about 10 years, and every single say something new comes up, so don't pick the hardest one to start with, go with one of the simpler where things are automated until you feel a bit more shure about how it works, then maybe try another distribution if you are not satisfied with the simple one.
I remember an old story of something similar many years ago where they where using a gas-lens for lasers to reduce the heat-stress you get on a glass-lens.
Watch out for 0-day exploits and never get something from Microsoft installed! ^_^
*scream* The GPLv3 is unfair!!! We got this source for free to use in our commercial product with minimal changes... Now we cannot use DRM with it...
*ironic*
I just hate companies like this.. They get something for free and think they can do anything with it, and don't even care about the wishes of the people that has written the actual source.
But hey.. They can still user DRM'ed stuff with that box... They just have to implement some hardware-chip that will do the DRM decoding and then the software just needs a driver to know how to send it to the chip.. But ofcourse adding something like that to the box will probably cost them more than doing it all in software.
And with a DRM chip they would not have this problem with the GPLv3 and people could do all the mods they wanted on the TiVo..
Much more fun to make it waterproof and enjoy the fishes outside the windows, just remember to make an exit on the second floor :)
If they wanna blow just the plane then it's probably impossible to stop them with any tech on the plane, but with a knockout gas they can at least prevent them from crashing the plane into a building..
Planes today can fly and even land automatically but it's not allowed to use yet since the tech is very new and not tested enough so that's why they still need pilots.. And just get a route to the closest airport and land there is probably allot easier than to have a spy-plane that flies on it's own in enemy territory where it has to avoid missiles and stuff.
And about security... Have a look at the televised encryption, the way they have broken that in the past is via hacking the cards to get the master-keys.. If you want something more secure for the planes then make the 'cards' unique for every plane and bump up the key-length and number of keys that needs to be used. So to make something like this secure is probably the easiest part. The hardest issues here are still the human factor since someone could pose as an engineer and do something to the plane, but they can do that even today if they just wanna crash the plane.. Doing something like this moves the security issue to the ground to the engineers, and it's probably much easier to catch someone tampering with the plane on the ground than it is to catch someone that just really wanna blow up a plane in the air.
So soon we will have 10^9 cores..
:)
Don't even wanna think about the overhead for checking locks
- Separate the cockpit from the rest of the plane and have their own entrance to it, if the pilots need access to the rest of the plane then make it the other way around by having the passenger area separate from the rest of the plane.
- Have a signal that can be sent to the plane that will allow remote-control or autopilot to the closest airport that the pilots cannot override without clearance from the ground.
- Signal from the ground can make the autopilot to set a specific course and altitude for a number of minutes.
- The lock on the cockpit door can only be unlocked by someone on the ground.
- Knockout gas that the pilots can release into the passenger area. (maybe better that a few people dies than the whole plane crashes)
And to make the communication with the plane more secure (so no one can interfere with the signals) allow for both laser and RF communication, maybe even put the whole passenger area in a faraday-cage and have 2 antennas for separate sat and ground communication.
Hehe... And that triggers MS to roll out a new version and make the 'stable' one unsupported ofcourse... Luckily i'm only using Linux at home but still forced to use windows at work.. But i dont care about all those reboots and patch-installations since i dont work in the IT department :)
:)
Windows is perfect at work.. 5-10 minutes of bonus-breaks during the day is really nice
Well, you don't seem to understand the point here..
:P
With electricity it would be the same, but then again you would have to go into the coffee-shop to use it and they could have a sign or the employees could tell him that... With WiFi you dont have that requirement so it's impossible to people to know if they are giving away some bandwith or if it is for private use. You don't seem to get the point.. If you have a WiFi connection it's broadcasting 'connect to me' over the air, and without requiring any key it is actually saying that it's there for everyone.
I'm just saying that a open WiFi connection is comparable to a public restroom or a public street.. But with physical locations it's much easier to tell people if it's for public or private use. If you dont want anyone to connect to your private network then just put a password on it to say it's private, or put signs all over the area saying that it is for private use
Well, if you take the car then nobody else can use it.
Better comparison would be with a bench standing in some public area without any signs telling you not to use it..
Or a trashcan in a public area, without any signs, is that also illegal to use? And this would also create a cost for the owner of the trashcan!
And making these types of comparisons is not a good way to reason.. Because with these things you can easily have a notice on or at them. But with 'virtual' stuff like wifi-access it's much more of a hassle to tell users 'We are for public use' compared to restricting access to it.... Best way for this would be to just have a sign in the coffee-shop saying "The WIFI access has password 'coffee' and is for customer use only" or just have a welcome-page that users are required to view/accept before they get access if they want to dumb it down for the customers.
Totally agree with you...
When unsecured it says 'welcome in', and how can you know that the AP is not for public use when unsecured like this? I know many friends that have open networks that anyone can use when walking by.
If they want it private just use WEP with a simple key, or if the users are brain-dead use a name like coffeeshop-Private.